HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS
“Walking out on the studio! You’ll never work in Hollywood again.” -Bruce Granit to Lily Garland, On the Twentieth Century
“Anyway, what is—was—a studio? A studio is a place governed by a budget set by a mogul who believes he can market certain kinds of stars who are presented by a staff of experts who hold certain social, artistic, and political aperçus in common.”
-Ethan Mordden, The Hollywood Studios
On the Twentieth Century is set amidst the Golden Age of the Hollywood film industry, and Lily Garland—once a stage ingénue, now a celebrated movie star—is the ambassador of the boom. With the rise of talking and color pictures in the 1920s, competition between movie studios increased, and the country’s leading studios stepped up their exertion of power. Five studios bought theatre chains across the nation in order to control production, distribution, and exhibition of their films (a process called “vertical integration”). All of the major studios (Warner Brothers, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal, Paramount, RKO, Fox [later Twentieth Century-
Fox], Columbia, and United Artists) launched into a period of fast-paced, money-conscious production, in which the importance of quantity ran neck-and-neck with (and sometimes ahead of) quality. On an individual basis, studios might produce some fifty films per year; in total, Hollywood studios churned out some 7,500 films during their 1930- 1945 heyday. And though the five vertically-integrated studios owned only 16 percent of American theaters, they took in about three-quarters of the industry’s revenue.
No wonder, then, that On the Twentieth Century’s Lily, a darling of MGM, would sing about gold silverware, a Cadillac, and copious champagne in “I’ve Got it All.” Movie
10 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY
stars were a product of the studio system and, while their fame lasted, they could reap its generous rewards. The Hollywood of the ‘30s and ‘40s retained the recognizable “types” of the nineteen-teens and twenties (the sweetheart, the hero), but with the advent of talking pictures, the industry also swelled with newly recognizable names and a type of personal celebrity that extended beyond the screen. The public appetite for these stars was both created and maintained by the studios’ ceaseless production, which, in turn, was fueled by economic need. The “exhibition” link in the chain of vertical integration was an expensive one. Approximately 95% of a studio’s operating cost, if it was vertically integrated, went to the cost of the movie theatres themselves. As a result, movie houses needed to keep
audiences in seats and production costs low. This constant need for new releases led to a profitable and predictable method of movie- making. In his book The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, author Thomas Schatz explains the powerful consistency of top-down studio filmmaking:
"The quality and
artistry of all these films were the product not simply of individual human expression, but of a melding of institutional forces. In each case the ‘style’ of a writer, director, star—or even a cinematographer, art director, or costume designer—fused with the studio’s production operations and management structure, its resources and talent pool, its narrative traditions and market strategy. And ultimately any individual’s style was no more than an inflection on an established studio style."
To illustrate his point, Schatz compares what a movie scene featuring a “darkened, rain-drenched street” might look like at three different studios. At Warner Brothers, we might watch a gangster, post-shootout, breathing his last breath (as in Public Enemy). At MGM, we’d see “a glossy, upbeat
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